Hidden Truth About Seed Oils - More Dangerous Than Sugar? with Dr. Cate Shanahan

The topic of seed oils has gotten somewhat trendy lately. A lot of attention being drawn to seed oils and a lot of confusing information as to should we be excluding them? How much do we need to be avoiding them? Why are they in everything? And especially if you're like me, your Generation X, you grew up in the 70s, the 80s. We watched the big push of moving things from saturated fat to seed oils. They seem to have been the thing that we were told was healthy, that we were doing the right things with. Today I've got Dr. Kate Shanahan on, and I wanted to have her on because I had read her book Dark Calories. I heard her on a number of other podcasts, and she has been talking about, studying, sharing about seed oils longer than anyone. So even though it's a trendy topic as of late, she was talking about this well before people were even raising up their ears, raising up their hands, saying, there's a concern here. So I wanted to go directly to the source and ask all the questions. I've got a lot of them. I'm sure you listening have a lot of them. So thank you so much for being here today, Kate.

Well, thank you, Natalie. I have a special place in my heart for midlife women, because I am one. Yeah, I know what it's like.

Yes. Lots of things that we're going through and a lot of things correlated to what we're about to talk about today that I think are going to be really, really relevant here. Yes.

There is so much about these oils that makes midlife more miserable than really nature ever intended for it to be.

So I want to back up a minute because you're a doctor, and this was something that became very important to you, this topic, and you have been talking about this, writing about it, screaming about it before anyone else was. Why did this get your attention, this specific topic?

Yeah, because of what you said in the introduction. Because, like you, I also grew up hearing that saturated fat is the unhealthy kind of fat. And, you know, that's what drove us to choose these heart healthy. It says right on the label on some of them vegetable oils that don't have saturated fat and that are, you know, because of their oil, their chemistry has polyunsaturates. And that's a term that, you know, a lot of doctors don't really know what that means. But I had gone to Cornell for biochemistry before entering medical school, so when I became interested in nutrition very early in my career, and then I encountered this term, polyunsaturated fats. Because of the chemistry training, I immediately knew those were very important to pay attention to because their behavior could make them dangerous to our health, to our cellular health. And, you know, since our bodies are made of cells, that's extremely dangerous for every organ in our body and every bodily function, things like hormone function, brain function.

Now take us back a little bit, because I remember in the 70s, and before we cooked with butter, we cooked with tallow. There was no vegetable oil cooking. Where did this shift? Where did it come from?

Yeah, so when I was a kid, McDonald's fries were fried in tallow, and boy, were they delicious.

I remember.

Yeah. But the idea that these oils are healthier than butter and tallow actually dates back many generations. It goes all the way back to the 1940s and 50s. And it really comes from the mind of one man in particular, whose name is Anel Keys. And this man has had a enormous and continues to have an enormous influence on medical thought and health thought and nutrition thought, not just in America, but globally. So understanding this man and what drove him, I think is very interesting and very, very important because it helps you see that, you know, how we got to this place where, you know, when you just think about where these oils come from, and I'd like to talk about that, they come from factories, right? Like, how could it be that our health depends on oils that don't exist in nature and, like, could not have existed, you know, before the industrial era, because they require huge factories. Their production requires massive, complicated processes that just weren't possible before the industrial era. So, you know, they weren't in our food supply at all. They've actually. So what you, you mentioned something about, like, our consumption of them has exploded, exploded since the 70s. But there were a little bit in the food supply, you know, since the industrial era, even at the, you know, as early as 1909, when they first started tracking, when we first have data, we think that consumption was maybe like a pound per person per entire year on average in the America. But now it's close to 60 pounds per person per year. So. Wow, that's a huge increase. And in terms of. Yeah, I mean, it's ridiculously large. And it has actually become now the number one source of calories for the average American who's not avoiding them, because we're getting probably 3, 4, 5, 600 calories per day, some of us, from the collection of eight seed oils that I've started calling the Hateful eight to help people recognize that there's eight of them. And we need to Memorize the eight.

What are the eight?

So there's three C's, corn, canola, cotton seed, three that start with the letter S. Soy. And those are the most important six to memorize. So you could call those the Sinister six. But rounding out, the other two members of the Hateful eight are the ones that are really only in restaurants. The other six are ubiquitous in grocery.

Stores, even health food. I. I'll pick up something I think is actually supposed to be healthy. And it says sunflower oil or safflower oil or soy.

Yes. So the other two are rice bran and grapeseed. And those are mostly in kind of your fancy upscale restaurants because they have this extreme health aura to them, which is extremely false.

Why did this become such a big push? What was wrong with butter? What was wrong with tallow? Why did that stop? Stopped. And even coconut oil. Why did those stop so abruptly?

Well, nothing was truly wrong with them. But what happened? And the reason that Ancel Keys was so influential is that in the middle of the 1900s, so we're talking about 1940s and 50s, there was a new health problem that really had not existed. And that is men were dying of heart attacks. They were being struck down really in the prime of their careers, in their 40s and 50s. And that was terrifying because no one understood. It was a new phenomenon. There was very little known about this. And this man, Ancel Keys, he just was, you know, my opinion of him is that maybe he slightly had his heart in the right place a little bit. But mainly he was an absolute egomaniac. And he wanted to attention. He wanted to be on the COVID of Time magazine. And guess what? He was on the COVID of time magazine in 1969. And that's what broke the news to the world that, oh, some scientist, only just him at the time, had made this connection, which was vague. What kind of connection? They didn't explain. There was some connection, vague connection between butter and saturated fat and heart attacks. Or maybe it was fat and heart attacks. It was a little muddy in the article. In the beginning, the message was muddy, but it had clarified later in the 60s, that, yeah, definitely the saturated fat and butter, that's the bad thing, supposedly. But this all comes from this man's agenda to be well known for solving the mystery of heart attacks. But he didn't solve the mystery because saturated fat doesn't cause heart attacks. Nevertheless, you know, there were moneyed interests behind this. You don't just end up on the COVID of Time magazine for totally meritorious reasons. I think we're all adult now enough to accept that, as you know, there's wonderful, amazing people out in the world that just don't get attention for it very often. If you're getting attention, there's some money behind your message. And there indeed was a massive amount of money behind the message of unsaturated fat because of a terrifically fantastic advertising idea that was created for the vegetable oil industry somewhere in the 1940, mid-1940s. That really manifested in a huge event that happened in 1948 that doctors need to learn about, but we don't.

What Was this in 1948? What was the thing that you're talking about?

1948 was a turning point in medical history because it was the year that a company selling vegetable oils called Proctor and Gamble donated $1.75 million in 1948.

Which is a lot. Yeah, that's like a billion now.

Yeah, yeah. It equates to multiple millions today. And they donated that to an organization called the American Heart association, which is a hugely influential private medical organization, mostly of heart specialists. Makes sense, right? Who at that time were very interested in finding the root cause of heart attacks. But this man named Ancel Keys was a master manipulator. He was a bully. He was probably a, you know, would be diagnosed as a narcissist today. But he was able to get many people to align with his ideology just by force of personality, by, you know, simply repeating his idea over and over again and basically insulting people who didn't go along with his ideas. I mean, classic bully behavior. You know, just standing tall and proud and making claims about his research that were unfounded. For example, he said, I have 5,000 heart attack cases. How many do you have? You know, he would say things like that to anybody who stood to his idea, saying, well, you know what? This doesn't really make a lot of sense. People were looking at. Other people were looking at smoking being a driver of heart attacks. And gee, turned out that they were right. It's just that the American Heart association never officially said, oh, wait a second, it was smoking. Back when we were supporting the idea with saturated fat and butter, we were wrong. They've never said that. They've never corrected the record because they're still getting money from the processed food industry.

So it's one of like the most. The first documented, like, where they were paid. And you had a strong personality saying, this is the way that it is, and forcing people to believe. And, you know, I witnessed this. My own father died of a heart attack 30 plus years ago. And that's what we were told. Saturated fat, you know, like cholesterol, like just the old belief set when truth the matter is that's not what it necessarily was. And I still see this being repeated today with countless cardiologists. It's really sad like that this belief set has continued on.

It is built in to doctors, medical education. The idea that saturated fat is dangerous is baked in to dietitians education. You know, yes, people talk about, well, you know, of course doctors get it wrong because they don't learn anything about nutrition. But that's. We do learn. We learn saturated fat causes heart attacks. What we learn about nutrition is wrong. And it's the same principles that dietitians learn about nutrition. So this is why it hasn't. The idea that saturated fat is, you know, bad is an idea that won't die even though there's really no credible support for it. There's just so much up parent research behind it. But you know, this is a big thing that I had to go through. I feel like I crawled down through this deep pile of baloney research. It was lots and lots of data. What I did was I looked at the references that supported current practices. And so like there was a document that came out, it was 200 pages long with hundreds of references. And in that I had to track down, okay, well where is their supporting evidence for this big idea? We're all living off of the saturated fat thing. So there was just one or two references in there in the whole multiple page document. So I tracked those down, was not easy because this was in early 2002. We didn't really have PubMed. And I had to actually ask my dad, who was also a doctor to xerox copy some of these old articles and send them to me. And those old articles, they referenced other articles, believe it or not. And so all of it ended up in this one document called the seven Countries Study. And when you read that, that it's just a pile of nonsensical musings about. It's not data. It's not what would be considered rigorous science. It's just like this guy Ancel Keys and his crew went on a bunch of trips around Europe and collected some information about people's blood pressures, heights, weights. It was nothing standardized, very little information about what they ate. And yet that document with very little actual, yeah, no tables of like, okay, here's what these people in this country ate. Nothing like to compare head to head. And then it makes all these claims without any head to head comparison. Because nobody looks, nobody does this. Digging through this horrible pile.

And this must have been very frustrating for you because you're seeing this and you're realizing the medical community is being taught something different. This is not accepted by mainstream even now, even though it's getting a little bit more accepted, and we're going to dive into that. But this must have been very frustrating for you. You're really ahead of your time seeing a lot of this.

I mean, you're so right. Like, I was living at the time on the island of Kauai, you know, a tiny little dot. So I was literally in the middle of nowhere, and I had found something that I felt was like, central to medical practice, right? That I wanted to knock on doors at, you know, Harvard and Yale and Stanford and say, look, we've gotten it wrong, and confront people. But I was in the middle of nowhere. And so it was impossible for me to, like, engage in the way that I needed to. You know, I was. Had to make a living. I had to keep being a family doctor, totally. So. But at the same time, it was really empowering because my whole, like, career, my whole reason for going to medical school was to get to the root cause of what people's problems were. And once I started studying how these oils affect our cellular health and just destroy any capacity for normal cell function, organ function, hormone function, brain function, et cetera, I was like, this is the root cause, like, one of the biggest root causes. And it's certainly a. An answer, something that I had been seeking my entire medical career. And so, you know, first I tried it on myself. After I did a lot of research, this wasn't just like, oh, yeah, I'm going to flip my whole conversation on nutrition. I did all this research, and then I tried it on myself, and I felt better. I started recovering. I had actually a serious health problem, and I started making some recoveries. And then I started on a few patients who had otherwise uncurable issues, like elevated triglycerid, fatty liver, inflammatory skin conditions. I'm like, what? Just try this. Try avoiding these oils. Are you eating any of them? And they're like, oh, yeah, I have fried and deep fry everything at home.

You know, but even without deep frying, I mean, I'll tell you, my own journey with this is I have the genetically high cholesterol, was told, you know, the wrong story about what cholesterol means and all that. I am lean, I do eat healthy, all the things. I was the person that avoided saturated fat, and things were getting worse. And so It's I don't eat the fried foods and do all that. But what I did correlate was higher sugar, so higher carbs, higher sugar and seed oils to elevating numbers in me. So it was just an interesting. All just on myself. Without having any proof or data or anything, I started to see that. So I think there's a lot of unanswered questions that a bunch of us are going to have, you know, right now, because we have a lot of work to do here. I mean, you look at stores, I mean, you can even go to a natural food store. Like, think of something that's more natural. And I understand that Whole Foods has been bought by Amazon and maybe that's not the best example example, but we think of Whole Foods as being a healthy version of a store. Right. So you buy something, you think, oh, these are gluten free, they're natural. There's very few ingredients in it. And there's still seed oil in it. It's in everything. And then you go to a restaurant and knowing our food is cooked in that, it feels unavoidable, even if you feel you're eating clean. What do we do?

Well, the first thing we do is we memorize those sinister sticks and start licking. You know, we have to turn every single bottle around because we really need to know what we're eating. And these are the number one single source of calories. And so we just want to get a handle on how they're coming into our body. So that's one to do. And then the other thing to do is has to do with a belief system. We have to erase this fear of high blood cholesterol. And you brought it up. So I want to make sure that before you and I hang up the cell phone, you are no longer worried about your high blood cholesterol.

Yeah, let's talk about this. I'm actually not worried about it, but I want about it for the aud. That's taken me a while to get there and I'm not anymore. But let's dive, dive into that because this is a big topic here.

Yeah. So first thing, because, you know, a lot of people are told they have genetically high cholesterol. Let's talk about what the evidence really shows about that. So that that condition where you have genetically high cholesterol, doctors call it familial hyperlipidemia. Hyper meaning too much, lipid meaning fat. Right. So in familial family, genetic. So familial hyperlipidemia raises your cholesterol and you are born with high cholesterol. When you're two years old, if you have familial hyperlipidemia, you know, drinking mother's milk and, you know, normal infant diet, you will have high cholesterol if you have this condition. And so it's not really related to diet. And so you can't really. There's no point in lowering it, right? In trying to change your diet. It won't lower it. But the thing, the good news is it's not a problem. In fact, researchers have found that people with this condition are more resistant to infectious disease. And, and this is a big deal, you know, especially the. It's interesting.

I think this is fascinating, this kind.

Of like medical history and genetics. These people come from Europe. A lot of people that have this condition are native to Europe or their family came out of Europe. And what was going on in Europe was that there were plagues after plague for thousands of years, bubonic plague, you know, serious life threatening things that would kill you in a few days. Right. So it turns out that the people who have this higher cholesterol come from these regions. And scientists think that because actually LDL cholesterol, the supposedly bad form of cholesterol, that is actually part of our immune system and it helps feed our immune system necessary nutrients so our immune system can go and fight off infection. Well, they think that's why they are genetically prone to high cholesterol. Cholesterol, and that it's actually a benefit. And if it's such a benefit, you know, my brain says, well, why doesn't everybody have this then if it's such a benefit? Well, the answer is it's costly. Not everyone can afford to, you know, make all that cholesterol. It's hard. It's a molecule to make, so you have to be very well nourished. And not everyone can do it. But why was this condition, this condition was associated with early mortality, but not in everybody. Who is it associated with early mortality in? Well, smokers. Smokers would. With high amounts of fat in their bloodstream, that fat would oxidize because they're smoking, they're inhaling toxins. And those toxins have this ability to oxidize our ldl. And when LDL is oxidized, then it can be a problem. It's not going to help the immune system. It's going to hurt the immune system. And so it becomes inflammatory for our arteries. So don't start smoking, Natalie.

No, I won't start smoking. But, you know, this hearing you, it Feels liberating talking to you about this. It's also infuriating to me because I feel that you take so many well meaning people like, people like you said, you go to medical school to help people, you want to get to root cause you want to help. And then you learn what you learn and you get convinced that these are the things and you don't think outside of the box. Not you specifically, but countless doctors. And I have been battling, and I mean battling doctors for 15 years now that when I get my lab telling me I need to go on cholesterol, you know, the same conversation and me bringing in my own data, me like, why do I have to do that? And me saying, I'm not doing this, this, and then seeking to find doctors that support my. This, what I do. And then, and then feeling amazing for 53 and all, you know, just because we have these specific markers, being told this rhetoric is just, it's tiring, it's exhausting. And I think people listening have been told this about their cholesterol. It is exhausting. And then you take a cholesterol medication, a statin, which creates a whole host of side effects and then takes away your protection. It just feels like we've been gaslit around this.

We have been gaslit, Natalie. And by the way, you look amazing for 53. So, yes, doctors have been misled, systematically misled. And, you know, you have to start asking the questions of, well, who benefits? And the answer is, you know, yeah, somewhat, somewhat the doctors. But I have to tell you, it's mostly the drug companies and it's mostly the cardiologists, because the cardiologists are the ones. You know, the thing is, the real truth about what's causing heart attacks is it's a crummy diet. And these seed oils play a huge role because they oxidize.

And I believe sugar too, is adding to that. I think, yes, you're absolutely right.

Sugar doesn't help at all. But I have to keep focusing on the seed oils because, you know, that's the thing that we were lied to about. That's where the gaslighting happened, right? Like, no one really takes anyone seriously if anyone says sugar is healthy, right? Like, oh, candy, that's a health food. I don't think anybody would believe that for a second. But we do believe that these, you know, putting a sunflower oil, a salad dressing is like a fantastic.

It's hard healthy. They think it's heart healthy. In fact, they're labeled heart healthy on labels and stores.

Right? And so doctors are so miseducated. But that's only the half of it. They're also highly controlled. Our behavior is hemmed in by fear of being sued. Right. So we are, you know, humans are herd animals if you go outside your herd. And so as a doctor, as a primary care doctor, that was kind of terrifying for me to start saying the words. No, actually, high cholesterol is a good thing. I'm not going to. You know, I think you should stop your statin to my patients. Right, yeah, that was very scary. Because if somebody were to do what I say, and then for whatever reason, you know, maybe something they did before, totally, maybe, you know, coke or something, end up in the emergency room with a heart attack, technically somebody I could be sued. Right, sure. So this is how our behavior. That's one big way our behavior is handed in. And that's like the most. The one that really reached me the most. But then there's another way, and that's social pressure. So this is where I got to explain something called pay for performance. Well, actually, it used to be called pay for performance. That was too obvious, so they changed the name now. So pay for performance was. Doctors get paid more if they perform, you know, according to guidelines. And the guidelines come from. The guidelines are all around getting people's cholesterol low. Not all the guidelines. There's hundreds of guidelines. But the guidelines that I'm concerned about are the ones about your ldl, your patients. LDL cholesterol has to be under a hundred or you will not get paid. You will be penalized. You might lose your job because your organization might be financially penalized. That's peer pressure, part of it. Right.

You know, my own doctor got a letter recently from an insurance company, an insurance company. Insurance should not be dictating treatment. The doctor should be. And the insurance company basically was scolding her, saying that we noticed you prescribed this one thing for your patient. Why did you not also prescribe cholesterol medicine? Interesting.

Yeah, exactly. And you know, just to put a little bit more detail behind that, the insurance companies are in bed with the drug companies and they're in bed with the hospital organizations. Right. The, in fact, the parent companies of insurance companies, in the case of UnitedHealthcare, is a company called Optum, which is a pharmaceutical mail order pharmaceutical company. Right. So it's really pharmaceutical industry that's driving this particular initiative to, you know, to scare terrified doctors in so many ways about not prescribing their patients statins. Doctors are terrified themselves by looking at the number if your cholesterol comes back and it's red on the lab and there's that little H next to it. I remember feeling this myself, where I look at that number and I'd be like, I better get this patient in here soon, because they might have a heart attack. You know, like I was so right, brainwashed, you know, nothing in my education countered that and everything reinforced it, that it was my job to make that little H go away with drugs.

Knowing and knowing what you know, that's really upsetting because you're thinking, I've got to do this, and you're seeing that this is just. Is not lining up.

Well, people would feel terrible in their drugs. Many people do. Yes.

They take stands, muscle aches, and all types of things. Yes, yes.

And they are scared to death of stopping because their doctors told them, if you stop that drug, you will have a heart attack in some cases. Not every doctor is so militant like that. But, you know, there are doctors out there, and I've heard from people who heard that from.

So if you are in that situation, I'll say this. Maybe I can, because I'm not a doctor, because this was me. You know, I had the high cholesterol, and I'm fit and lean and do all the things and all that. So what I ended up doing is I said, fine, I'll have a coronary artery scan every year if I have to. I'll have a clearly done. I will show you. You that I have zero plaque, zero clogged arteries. So there's nothing at which I showed I have zero. So you're listening and you're thinking, I'm doing everything right. My doctor's insisting that I go on a statin, Ask why and go and prove that you don't have the clogged artery problem or keep going, because that's what I. I literally did that. I went and had that done and said, I'll do this every year if I have to.

Yeah. So that's one way to do it. Absolutely. I wish there were a better test, because the coronary calcium score can be elevated in people who have very minimal risks.

Oh. So it could show that you have something even if you don't. You're saying so. It could show that you've got more than. It's actually there.

This is complicated. It could show the calcium is only in this. Plaques are a scar in our artery.

Okay.

There's damage to the artery. It starts out soft. The whole plaque starts out soft. That's when it's Dangerous. That's when it's attracting white blood cells. That's when it's inflammatory, it's damage. The body stabilizes all that with calcium.

I see.

So you can see the problem because what we're looking at is a reflection of stable plaque that's not going to hurt you. And it's only an indirect measure of, well, how much maybe has your arteries been scarred. But it doesn't tell you anything that you about your current diet and your current.

That makes sense. Okay.

Unfortunately.

Now this is interesting too. I noticed that a few of my markers on my lab labs would change if I did eat seed oils. In fact, I had some labs done and I had the night before had gluten free fried calamari, which I'm sure with seed oil. And I had labs the next day and right away could see a reflection on the lab. So seed oils directly impact our labs pretty quickly. And if we're eating the amount you're saying even unknowingly, what is that creating to our system?

It's terrible. It's inevitably going to create disease. You know, the thing is that I found that all of our chronic disease epidemics. So the heart attacks, the strokes, the kidney problems, the hypertension, the diabetes, the weight gain, the inflammatory conditions. Inflammatory inflammation drives thyroid disease. Right. A very common disease. Inflammation in the brain drives bipolar disorder and a lot of other serious mental illnesses. The stress from all of this makes hot flashes miserable during menopause. Inflammation in the gut, of course, causes lots of gut symptoms. Gastritis, esophagitis, heartburn. It can cause irritable bowel, can cause inflammatory bowel. So wow, the list goes on. I mean, when you ask like what does this do to us? The answer is literally everything. I mean it almost sounds impossible. Like it's almost.

It sounds like it's the worst thing that's happened to our food supply.

It is. Absolutely. You hit the nail on the head. Seed oils are the worst thing that has happened to our food supply in a million years of being a human being in anywhere on earth. And in fact we have exported this idea that seed oils are heart healthy around the world. And you can track the seed oil consumption by country and it tracks with obesity, with diabetes, with cancer rates, with wild a type of blindness called macular degeneration. I mean literally the evidence is everywhere. And it's insane to me that the medical system is just so uninterested. Yeah. In digging a little bit deeper into this incredible correlation that we have. What's a correlation? You know, the Fact that the more seed oils we eat, the sicker we've gotten. Right. Well, they say, oh, that's just a correlation. Then they make all these things like, yeah, and the more TVs we've bought, the fatter we've got. And, you know, stuff like that. Of course, that doesn't.

Yeah, it's. You know, I. You said something in your book that really. I think it was your book, maybe it was on one of the episodes I listened to. But you said that seed oils can cause uncontrollable hunger. This is a big one because I. For midlife women, they think it's the hormone changes. They think it's this or they've just been blaming it on the sugar. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah. So this is one of the discoveries that came to me most recently. And, you know, I figured this out because I was really unclear on the connection between seed oils and weight gain. Right. Like, I could get it with the inflammation, I could get it with the autoimmune disease and the everything else, but I couldn't quite get how does that making us fat. And then I started looking at how our cells produce energy, and that was where I found the answer. Because our cells produce energy in these little things, these amazing little creatures that weren't even really human. They're former bacteria that just now our cells host them all. They're called mitochondria. So our mitochondria produce energy for all of our cells, vast majority of energy. And when our mitochondria have to use so much of these, the type of chemical that comes from the seed oils, both the toxins and the polyunsaturated fatty acids, those two things destroy our mitochondrial health. And they make it so that our mitochondria immediately stop producing so much energy. And it's an immediate threat to our cellular health. So the only option that cells have is to use more sugar that's in the bloodstream. Right. That lowers our blood sugar. How do you feel when you lower your blood sugar?

Hungry. Tired? Shaky?

Yes, Hungry. And so this is why, if you've heard the term hangry more often recently than you did growing up. That's why.

So now I'm thinking, you know how much I've educated people about when you eat a high carb meal or a lot of starches, you create this INS surge. And now you're getting tired. But I wasn't even thinking about now when you're adding that with seed oils, what that's creating, we're just creating A huge cluster of issues from that. The combination. Even so we. Seed oils are doing that. But imagine with the sugar and the. The starchy carbs.

Yes. I mean, I think this is a huge breakthrough in our understanding of human behavior. You know, eating, I think, you know, I'm trying to get it published because I think it's so important that other doctors understand this. And if it's not published in, you know, like a medical journal, they're not going to take it serious. But other projects keep getting in the way. But anyway, you know, that is, you know, my hypothesis. It's a hypothesis. Obviously it could be wrong, but I need people. It's worked right. First of all, it's worked right. Like I've. In dark calories, I explained to people how you can go from being hooked on snacking every, you know, two to three hours, feeling hangry, getting brain fog, feeling like your cravings are out of control, feeling like you're always, always hungry, feeling like you need a zempic to not overeat, how you can go from that state in dark calories. I explain exactly what you need to do, what you need to eat, how you need to plan your meals to get away from that state. And by the way, that state is. Has a name. Medical science has recognized it. We call it insulin resistance. But we do believe, wrongly, focusing only on the carbs because this idea is that the, you know, carbs spike insulin and too much insulin is the problem. I used to think that was the case, but then once I, you know, started focusing more on, you know, what are the seed oils doing? And, you know, why are people hungry all the time? What's going on? Why do people feel like their metabolism is slowing down when that isn't really a thing?

No, it's. It really makes sense. And it's also making sense. You know, I just think about being in Europe where they don't have seed oil and all of their. And all of their stuff as much as here. And we have this, you know, people say, oh, the carbs are better quality. We weren't even considering about the seed oil piece. But maybe a big reason we feel better eating food. There is that reason too.

Yes. And, you know, that is absolutely the case. And then unfortunately, it is seeping into Europe as well because there's only so much olive oil, you know, to go around. And everybody there has also been programmed about totally being afraid of the traditional foods. It's just that more. There's a delay there, like the American Heart Association. It took a while for them to export that deadly idea to the rest of the world. Like we actually started in this country. The American Heart association started pushing the oils way far back in the early 50s. And you know, so we have a three generation head start on it. Whereas it wasn't until like the 80s and the 90s where European countries had, have started to adopt that. And in different European countries, like kind of in proportion to how much they hate the United States, like I'm thinking of Russia, they actually don't, you know, worry quite so much about that. And if you look at the Russian food pyramid, there's some very interesting things on there, including vodka and caviar and things that would have like saturated fat in there. And they don't even really promote seed oils at all.

So I notice in Mexico and I notice in South America, seed oils are very prevalent. In fact, we were, my husband and I, a few years back, we went on a mission where we are helping to build homes and feed people in Nicaragua. And there was a huge obesity epidemic, I noticed. But these people were very, very poor, like didn't have homes. And we were putting together food supply. And I was so frustrated because the food supply, it was great that people had raised money and raised food, but the food supply they were putting together was a huge jug of canola oil and, and all corn products, wheat products, it was like, and canned soups with seed oil. And it was like not one thing that was going to help with this. So I'm thinking here they're so poor, they're so hungry and this is what we're giving them. This is not helpful.

And this is exactly what you find in America and what they call food deserts. Right? Wow. There's a term called the social determinants of health which doctors, you know, learn are very important determinants of your health other than genetics. Like. But diet, of course, is the most powerful social determinant of health and the diet that people eat. So they've coined this term called food deserts, which refers to places where there's really either no grocery stores and only convenience stores or, you know, the, where you can buy food, you cannot buy healthy food. It's all only processed food. You can't get fresh vegetables, you can't get fresh meat. Meats, that's what they call food deserts. But in those food deserts they are flooded with vegetable oil. And that's exactly the same problem. Like we're feeding famine foods in our own country, in our, you know, the, one of the, probably the wealthiest country on the planet. Well, somewhere approaching A third or maybe more of the population is living on famine foods, basically because a huge portion of people are living in food. Desert desserts.

What do we do here? Because there's a lot of us that are in a spot of privilege where I can go buy avocado oil. I could use olive oil. I can use real butter, I can use tallow, I can do all the things I can eat at home and I can request even when I go to a restaurant, hey, please don't cook this in oil. Please use butter instead. Which I do. I'm that person in the restaurant. But what do we do about the masses? Because this is not common. This is everywhere. What do we do about people struggling? The food prices are off the charts right now. Now it's hard enough to buy food.

Oh, I know. It's, you know, the most important thing that we can buy, I think, in my opinion. And it's. I think the prices have almost doubled in the past 10 years. It's harder to make the right choice unless you're in the top. I don't know what, 10, 20% economic. Sure. People are struggling, you know, even at above average. Yeah.

So it's almost like that's why I asked this, because I'm. I'm serum. Putting this information out. We're sharing this information. Great knowledge is a lot of power. But what do people actually do now?

Now? Yeah. So the first thing that I think has to happen to fix this is I do think it has to be some kind of a, you know, powerful organization taking control of the conversation and ripping apart the American Heart association and destroying their ideology. And that's why I'm so excited to. That RFK, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Has started sounding the alarm on seed oils. And I know why it's happened, because his main health advisor, his sister, actually read two of my earlier books.

Oh, wow.

Where I talk about how seed oils are prone inflammatory and they harm our mitochondria. Yeah. And so she wrote from that, you know, she learned a lot and wrote her own book that she's now promoting. But during this whole thing, Robert F. Kennedy became interested and his health advisor is the, you know, sister of this doctor who read my book. So, like, amazingly, the work of, like, some nerd that lives in this tiny little house and not associated with a university or a think tank or anything. And to me, me, it's amazing that my little voice seems to be starting to make a really big difference.

Incredible.

And, you know, I guess I'm proud of that. Yeah, you should be. But I see that also. I feel so hopeful about that because it's really what I've been working for for the past 20 years, you know, amazing. And I, I think we might start to see some change because big changes have to happen. We're producing too much canola oil and soy oil, and we have to, to stop. And to stop doing that. There's subsidies, there's farm subsidies, there's farming practices that have to change. We can do it, but it has to be at a systematic level. And so until that happens, if somebody wants to be healthy tomorrow, then they really have to understand that they can. First they have to believe they can do it. They have to shed these deadly beliefs that we've all grown up with. And then they have to start, start putting their mind to it and realizing that they are a problem solver. This thing between our ears is a problem solving machine. I had a patient when I was living in New Hampshire who was on welfare. A single mom. She was unemployed because of her own mental health problems. She did not have a kitchen. And she read one of my earlier books and, you know, was with just a little encouragement for me, she did some amazing things. She started making bone broth in her own kitchen. She just got rid of all the, the crappy foods and, you know, started cooking from dinners on her own. Nothing complicated, just burgers. She have some simple lunches. You know, cheese is good for you. Eggs are relatively cheap, extremely nutritious, very good for you. You know, she would get the cheapest vegetables that she could find and just have a few of those. But then she started a garden. Like she bought seeds and she didn't have, she lived in an apartment. But what did she do to start a garden? Well, there was a community garden in the middle of the city. City. So she went there, she got a hot plate to make her own.

She found ways.

She found, she found ways and she helped her son. Like her son had worse mental illness than she did. And these foods made her feel so much better that it inspired her son.

So when we look at, because I want to be really clear here about the seed oils that are bad and what's not bad because you're not against seeds, you're not against pumpkin seeds or sunflower seeds or the actual actual seed. You're against the seed oil the way it's produced in factory. Can you talk about how it's actually produced? Because I don't think people realize what this is actually coming from.

Yeah, it's disgusting. So it's produced in factories in Massive, massive scale. And these are seeds that were never bred to be particularly good sources of oil. So, you know, sunflower seed was bred to be food, but food before oil. And of course, cotton seeds were bred to be, to be textiles, not even to be eaten. Right. And safflower, same, you know, not really a big. In the food supply there. Tiny little seeds, you can't live on those. So it's only this industrial scale stuff. And what happens is just they heat it, they pressurize it, and the crude oil that comes out of the seeds is inedible because of reactions that take place. That has to do with the chemistry of, you know, polyunsaturated fats. That's why people did not eat those, that kind of fat in the way that we are now. That's why saturated fat is really the kind of fat that humans need, because the polyunsaturates are prone to deteriorating and they deteriorate into toxic compounds that can't be removed in spite of all the processing. But the processing does remove a lot of the vitamins. Almost all the minerals and many other very, very important nutrients are gone. The oils, when they finally come out of the factory, they're actually colorless because all the, you know, the nutrients that would give them color, they're clear. It looks, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a bottle of water until you picked it up and saw that it was thick.

Sure.

And it has no smell like olive oil smells like olives. Peanut oil smells like peanuts. Right. Butter. Yeah, there's a little buttery smell. That should be a red flag. But, you know, we're trained not to trust our instincts. So what does it look like when the fruit oil is first produced? It looks like a brown sludge. I mean, it's, it's like a lot like motor oil. To clean up that brown sludge, you have to deodorize it, dewax it. You have to watch it.

So we're eating this, we're eating this whole process. It's gross.

Well, we're eating the end result, which doesn't have like too many added toxins in it anymore. Most of them have been cleaned out. But it does have these accidentally created toxins. And the crazy part, and this is why this chemistry is so, you know, poorly understood by doctors, these toxins have the ability to multiply in the bott before you even open it. So, like, it starts out with like parts per million. By the time you eat it, we're much higher amounts of toxins so that like One french fry. When you. You heat things, every time you heat them, more toxins form. You expose them to air, oxygen oxidizes, more toxins form. So one french fry has as much toxicity as smoking an entire cigarette. A single French fry.

You know, I heard that in your book, and I stopped eating. I was like, I will never eat a restaurant french fry again ever, based on that. Like that. That is crazy to me. And by the way, I love french fries. I just take a potato and I cut it out and put it in my air fryer now and use a little olive oil. That's so you can make it healthy.

Hard to make potatoes delicious, right? I mean, we don't need to go out to eat them.

No. What about.

I want.

I do have another question a little bit off topic with here, but with seed oil, I'm somebody who has had basil cell carcinoma a few times, skin cancer. And I chalked that up to sunbathe, like extreme tanning in my 20s. And I did use tanning beds in my 20s. I did a lot of dumb things. But there's a whole wave of thought process around it's not the sun creating skin cancers, that it's seed oils. And I don't understand that. Do you know anything about that? And can you help us with that, where that's coming from?

Well, yes, and it has to do with what is the real cause of cancer. And that is another revolutionary idea. And if you're interested in that, I do talk about that also in dark calories and. Okay, chapter eight. But it has to do with what causes cancer. And we really now are understanding that it comes from mitochondrial damage. Remember earlier I was saying those things in our cells that used to be bacteria that generate energy? Well, what happens is UV light can actually damage those little mitochondria. But fortunately, we have. Our skin is supposed to do this thing called tanning. What is tanning for? Well, tanning produces a pigment, a dark pigment called melanin. And that melanin traps UV light.

Okay.

And protects our mitochondria. So when all is well, we tan when we're exposed to sun.

Okay.

No matter our heritage, we should be able to tan except for just a, you know, few people, or I'm Irish, so a few people in my family don't have very well. But what happens with the seed oils and why they're having this conversation? This comes from my first book because I explain how the sun ignites reactions in the fat under our skin when our diet is full of seed oils, because seed Oils are fat under our skin, where we store our fat.

Sure.

And seed oils are. You have to keep them away from light. Right. UV light actually ignites reactions, free radical reactions in the oils. Well, it'll do that in our skin. And that's why people burn instead of. Of tanning when our diets are.

That makes sense.

Full of seed oils. Right. And so, you know, the key to understand this, you know, I just, I'm glad it makes sense to you because it's pretty technical. It's all.

Yeah, you're the first one that's explained it in a way that made sense. I did not. Because I'm not going to be out baking in the sun at 53. I don't want the wrinkles. I don't want that. And. Right. So I don't want that. But there's something to be said about. I mean, I can't say that the skin cancer was not caused from that. I grew up on tons of seed oils, so I don't know.

Yeah, I would say you take away seed oils, you take away skin cancer, like most of it. Right. I mean, people can damage their mitochondria other ways. Cigarette smoking is one way. And excessive UV light. Yeah.

An extreme burn in a tanning bed is not helping anyone.

Exactly.

Yeah.

We can damage our. Our mitochondria other ways, but the main source these days, I believe, is the seed oils. And I actually have a graph figure, I mean, where I draw out how wrinkles form and why seed oils promote worse wrinkling in my, oh, first book, which is called Deep Nutrition.

Okay, we'll have to check that out.

Yeah.

This has been, this has been so informative. Her book that got my attention is called Dark Calories. You can get that anywhere. Do you want them to go a specific place to look for that book or just anywhere they find books?

I would love it if people would visit my website so that you can sign up for my monthly newsletter. And that way I'm working on a course on. Actually a course for. That'll just walk people through how to reclaim their cooking skills.

Ooh, I love that.

Yeah. And so when that. That's finished, you'll be notified if you sign.

So how do. Where do they go? What's your website for them to find that?

It's Dr. Kate.com and that's D R C A T E dot com. And then at the top it says something about newsletter subscribe. It's like an orange button. And I'll give you a few emails at the beginning, but I don't bombard people. It's not going to be flooding your inbox with something to delete every day except for the first few days.

Amazing. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Shanahan. And we're going to wrap here, but we're going to stay on for the community community for just a minute. We've got midlife conversations.com forward/live, if you're interested in the community, where you get free access to my podcast recordings before they release on YouTube or on podcast platforms. And then members are allowed to stay on and ask questions. Thank you so much.